Category: reason

Voting is important—to politicians,
because it gives them a sense of validation. Good-government types
like the whole balloting ritual, too, because they get warm fuzzies
from seeing others invest time and energy into the institution that
defines so much of their sense of self-worth. That’s why you’ll be
endlessly nagged—and even receive implied threats—to drive you to
punch your card, fill in the oval, or tap the screen for the
candidate who disgusts you least. But in terms of influencing
government officials, grimly performing what others insist is a
duty every couple of years and then (with good reason) bitching
about the outcome isn’t the last word in civic participation.

If you want to keep politicians on their toes, writes J.D.
Tuccille, you should “vote” to embarrass officials, free prisoners,
and carve out areas of life beyond state control.

View this article.

As we have noted here several
times in the last few years, Section 280E
of the Internal Revenue Code bars state-licensed marijuana
merchants from deducting business expenses on their tax returns.
USA Today reports
that disallowing those deductions can result in an effective tax
rate ranging from 70 percent to 100 percent. Needless to say, that
handicap makes it hard to stay in business.

USA Today describes the predicament of Mitch
Woolhiser, proprietor of Northern Lights Cannabis Co., a
dispensary in Edgewater, Colorado, who last year owed $20,000 in
federal income tax even though he did not turn a profit. “It’s
almost like they want us to fail,” he says. Well, yes, it is
exactly like that, if “they” refers to the members of Congress who
enacted Section 280E in 1982 as way of sticking it to drug dealers.
Woolhiser still qualifies as one of those under federal law, even
though he is licensed by Colorado to sell marijuana.

Counterintuitively, cannabusinesses are allowed to deduct the
“cost of goods sold,” which includes whatever they spend to grow or
purchase marijuana. The upshot, as I explained
in Reason last year, is that a can of coffee in the
break room may not be deductible, but a jar of Lemon Diesel buds on
the shelf is. I say “may not” because marijuana merchants can try
to deduct a portion of their business expenses, including
big-ticket items such as rent, utilities, and wages, by attributing
them to activities other than supplying cannabis. But that tactic,
which is used mainly by medical marijuana dispensaries that provide
ancillary services to patients, is complicated and open to
challenge.

The IRS is
not known for flexibility in dealing with state-legal
cannabusinesses, but it does not have the discretion simply to
ignore Section 280E. USA Today quotes a 2010 IRS
letter to members of Congress who wanted it to stop enforcing
Section 280E in states that have legalized marijuana for medical or
recreational use. “The result you seek would require the Congress
to amend either the Internal Revenue Code or the Controlled
Substance Act,” the IRS said. That is not quite true, since the
executive branch has the power to reclassify marijuana under the
Controlled Substances Act without new legislation from Congress.
Since Section 280E applies only to substances in Schedule I or II,
moving
marijuana to Schedule III or lower would make it much easier
for cannabusinesses to pay their tax bills.

Everybody’s favorite libertarian-leaning senator

told BuzzFeed News that he is perfectly okay with D.C. voters
opting to legalize marijuana on their ballots today.

“I think there should be a certain amount of discretions for
both states and territories and the District,” Rand Paul said when
asked about the legalization measure on D.C.’s ballot by BuzzFeed
News after he voted in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on
Tuesday. 

“I think really when we set up our country, we intended that
most crime or not crime, things we determine to be crime or not
crimes is really to be determined by localities,” Paul
said. 

Paul would not say whether he supported the actual measure,
however. That’s fairly typical of Paul, and while it might not be
as strong a statement as libertarians would want, it’s certainly
preferable to the anti-drug moralizing and grandstanding that
prominent Republicans have resorted to in years past.

Follow Reason 24/7 tonight for live updates on the fate of
libertarian-aligned ballot measures and candidates here.

Professional idiot comedian Russell
Brand has a new book out, Revolution, pimping his
half-baked ideas about an anti-capitalist revolution. Michael
Moynihan (Reason
contributing editor) read it for The Daily Beast,
and
dismissed it for its mistakes and misquotes and for being
unfunny and unreadable. He pulled one choice quote to show what
Brand’s writing is like:

“This attitude of churlish indifference seems like nerdish
deference contrasted with the belligerent antipathy of the
indigenous farm folk, who regard the hippie-dippie interlopers, the
denizens of the shimmering tit temples, as one fey step away from
transvestites.”

That quote, in turn, was used to create a meme where Brand’s
verbosity is interrupted by “PARKLIFE!”, a reference to a 1994 Blur
song. Buzzfeed explains
it, and catches Brand’s response to his criticism, via
Twitter: “It’s weird how highly paid, privately educated
journalists who work for the corporate media attack my book
Revolution.”

Russell Brand is reportedly worth around $15 million, the kind
of money his ideology says is “hoarded” when it’s all in one place
or one person. Nevertheless his book, Revolution, an
anti-capitalist screed, is available for sale at capitalist
enterprises like
Amazon. Despite the possibility in 2014 to release a manifesto
like Brand’s at no cost to the reader over the internet—and Brand’s
fame would guarantee a wide audience—Brand chose the more
traditionally capitalist route of charging good money for his book.
It’s his right in a market we would deem free, but it wouldn’t be
in the kind of market Brand would impose on the rest of us. Weird
indeed.

Almost all of the political jabber is about which
party gets to control the Senate or over a few tight gubernatorial
races. But local contests count in people’s lives too, and offices
further down the ticket are often more accessible to both
candidates and voters. There may be no place where that is more
true than in New Hampshire, which enjoys a 424-member legislature.
Libertarian-oriented Free Staters moving to the Granite State have
had such success in making waves that Democratic State
Representative Cynthia Chase
proposed to “restrict the ‘freedoms’ that they think they will
find here” just to make the state less attractive to migrants.

That genius is
still in office, sad to say. But a lot of liberty-friendly
people—some Free Staters, others locally sourced—have joined her in
the legislature. This year, the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance, “a
non-partisan coalition working to increase individual freedom in
New Hampshire” boasts that “a
stunning 80% of NHLA-endorsed candidates advanced to the general
election.” Many of those candidates—mostly Republicans, but some
Democrats, too—are incumbents. There are a lot of them.

Are those lawmakers getting anything done?

Last month, Dick Desrosiers, Chairman of the Hampton Democratic
Committee, complained
in a letter to the editor:

As a result of the 2010 election, the New Hampshire Liberty
Alliance (NHLA), a main organization for carrying out the
strategies of the FSP, orchestrated the election of Representative
Bill O’Brien to the position of House speaker. As speaker, Mr.
O’Brien employed strong arm tactics to oust long-term Republicans
and replace them with Free Stators. He used such tactics to
introduce and pass legislation to remove any and all government
impacts on liberty and property rights and diminished the
importance of protecting and promoting the common good.

Yes, I thought that was an endorsement, too. But really, he was
expressing unhappiness with the situation. Go ahead and read the
rest of it.

And keep an eye on those local races in New Hampshire and,
hopefully, near you.

Didn’t vote? Don’t want to vote? Don’t worry about it. It almost
certainly won’t matter anyway. In this 2008 video, Gordon Tullock,
a Professor Emeritus at the George Mason University School of Law,
and one of the founders of public choice economics, explains
why. 

Vote if you want to. Vote if you enjoy voting. Vote if you care
about a candidate, or about the process itself. But don’t vote
because you feel obligated to do so, or because you think your vote
alone is likely to make a difference. And no matter what, if you
don’t vote, don’t feel bad about it. 

In 2012, Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward explained why
your
vote doesn’t count. And over at Bloomberg View, Megan McArdle*
offers five good reasons to
skip voting today. For the counterargument, here’s
Reason‘s Ed Krayewski
making the libertarian case for voting. 

*I am married to this person. 

The most entertaining election data of the day comes from
Google, which has
posted the most popular search terms associated with candidates
around the country. Here, for example, are the results for
Georgia’s would-be governors:

Deal is
ahead in the polls, but evidently he’s losing the
word-association race. I mean, “Related To Jimmy Carter” isn’t the
first thing I’d want people searching with my name, but
Deal clearly has it worse.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the gubernatorial race appears to be a
contest between “Net Worth” and “Not Prepared”:

“Not Prepared” has been a popular pair of words in this race:
The Democrat deployed the phrase in a gaffe last
spring and the GOP has been running
with it ever since. Snyder’s net worth, for the record, is
“in
the vicinity of $200 million.”

Elsewhere, Scott Brown’s Cosmo
centerfold is still on people’s minds, in whichever organ those
minds might be located:

Finally, these are the results for President Obama, who isn’t
running for anything this year but
looms ominously above all the Democrats who are:

The term at #3
surprises the staff of The Federalist: “The third
most-searched term connected to Obama is ‘divorce’? Really?” I’m
not so shocked: Given how hard The National Enquirer has
been
hitting the dubious idea that an Obama divorce is on the
horizon, I’m surprised the word isn’t ranked even higher. There are
people who buy supermarket tabloids, and there are people who wait
til they get home and then Google what they saw on the cover. Or,
um, so I hear.

Think twice before you post
that grinning voting booth selfie followed by the #turnoutforwhat
hashtag, because you may be commiting a felony. 

As reported by the Peoria
Journal Star, “Section 29-9 of
(Illinois‘) election code essentially says that you
can‘t show other people who you‘re voting
for, even in a photo after the fact.“ The law has
been on the books since 1974, passed by the legislature as a means
of
stifling “vote-buying“ schemes,
intimidation, and other forms of tampering. Though local election
officials told the Journal Star they had never heard of
the law being enforced and the Peoria County State‘s
Attorney said he would
be “unlikely“ to prosecute a
voting booth selfie violator, the code remains a Class 4 felony on
the state books.

It’s not just Illinois. Dozens of states have restrictions
on photographing your ballot. The Digital Media Law
Project produced a
thorough examination of ballot disclosure laws in 2012, which
they described as a “First Amendment Anomaly”:

As reflected in our new guide, many states have statutes that
prohibit the display of one’s own marked ballot to others. A small
number of these states only prohibit disclosure of one’s ballot in
the voting room or prior to submission of the ballot, but most
impose a flat prohibition on disclosure backed up by criminal
penalties or cancellation of the vote in question. These statutes
by their explicit terms appear to ban sharing of a photograph of
one’s ballot even after the election is over.

Now, we can debate the wisdom of a voter openly declaring the
candidate for whom he or she voted. There are sound reasons for a
person to keep his or her ultimate selection secret, whether to
prevent intimidation at the polling place or retribution by
employers or others after the fact. It is easy to imagine
situations in which the thoughtless posting of a marked ballot on
Facebook could result in negative consequences, as with the posting
of so many other ill-advised Facebook photos.

And yet, the First Amendment’s protection is at its peak in the
realm of speech on political issues. Can a law prohibiting a voter
from disclosing his or her own marked ballot be constitutional?

Just this week, the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against
the “Live Free or Die” state of New Hampshire for updating its
existing ban on photographing a marked ballot to specifically
prohibit “taking a digital image or photograph of his or her marked
ballot and distributing or sharing the image via social media,”
punishable by up to a $1,000 fine.

Unlike in Illinois, the law is being enforced. According to

Boston.com, at least 3 citizens of the Granite State have been
investigated by the state’s attorney general for posting their
ballot to social media, including a police officer who voted for
his dead dog as a write-in candidate for the Senate. In an act
of defiant rebellion against his own state’s law, State Rep. Leon H. Rideout
(R-NH), a co-plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit, tweeted
his marked-up ballot during this past September’s Republican
primary election “to
make a statement.” To date, he has not been fined.

So be careful out there today when bragging about fulfilling
your civic duty, or at least check the Digital Media Project’s
helpful guide to see if your state has laws curtailing
post-election political speech. As civil liberties
lawyer and Reason contributor Harvey
Silverglate wrote in his book “Three
Felonies a Day,“ the average American
may regularly and unwittingly
engage in felonious activity, but he/she will
generally not record and publish these petty crimes all over social
media. 

Simple and personal are two things not often used
to describe government. Internet giants like Facebook and Google
want to change that for Election Day.

The Hill
explains:

“While every election is important, the voting process can often
feel complicated, with the information about how to head to the
polls spread across multiple official sources,” Google executive
Anthea Watson Strong wrote in a recent blog post.

To simplify the process, Google is displaying state-specific
details when people use search phrases such as “register to vote”
or “how do I vote.”

Searching on Google for “who is on my ballot” brings up a list
of all the candidates running for the federal, statewide and local
offices in any given area, while “where is my polling place” lists
local polling places.

A Google page specifically set up for the elections —
google.com/elections — lists the latest news and YouTube videos
about the candidates as well as aggregated data about common
political Google searches. 

Facebook users may have noticed the “I’m Voting” button, known
as the “voter megaphone,” at the top of their newsfeed today. It’s
been rolled out slowly each election season since 2008, and it’s
now visible to anyone 18 or over.

“Our effort is neutral,” a Facebook representative
tells The Verge. “While we encourage any and all
candidates, groups, and voters to use our platform to engage on the
elections, we as a company have not used our products in a way that
attempts to influence how people vote.”

 Still, people have been wary of the social media site’s
influence since it conducted an apolitical psychology experiment by
tailoring what shows up on a user’s newsfeed. And, the vote button
did, according to a 2010 study, account for
around 600,000 additional votes that year. “If you’re told your
friends have voted, you’re 0.39 percent more likely to vote
than someone who hasn’t,” The Atlantic explains.

In general, social media and technology are playing a larger
role in the way people participate in our democratic republic.
“Sixteen percent of registered voters said they follow politicians
on social media, compared with the 6 percent who said they did so
in 2010. The leap has been even bigger among middle-aged voters. Of
registered voters from 30 to 49, 26 percent said they follow
politicians online and 40 percent of whom said they’ve used their
phones to help keep up with news about the elections,” CNN
reports based on Pew Poll data released yesterday. 

Reason previously noted that another tech giant,
Microsoft, has also put some skin in the game. They’ve predicting
the outcome of the election.
Guess who the big winners are.

I’m speaking at what is shaping up to be a great
debate event tomorrow at The Newseum in Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by the great Spiked Online, the day’s panels are
dedicated to preserving
Free Speech Now.

In the first discussion, “Taming the Messenger: The New Threats
to Press Freedom,” I’ll be talking with Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill,
Al-Jazeera’s Ray Suarez, and the Committee to Protect Journalists’
Courtney Radsch.

In the second debate, “The Press in the 21st Century: Are
we all Journalists Now?,” the panel will ask whether “citizen
journalism” helps or hinders journalism’s pursuit of the
truth.

The “Taming the Messenger” panel starts at 9.15 A.M. ET
and the doors open at The Newseum at 8 A.M.

The event is free but you need to sign up.

Please go here to
RSVP.

Note: I mistakenly gave the time for my panel as
10 A.M. in an earlier post. The correct time is 9.15
A.M.